Holmes, Oliver Wendell. "The Iron Gate".

Summary and Analysis

- a poem on the theme of ageing and dying, written for the occasion of the author's 70^th birthday

- the speaker welcomes a patriarch coming to his threshold, whom he has known well, but now the man is old, weak, and ill

- juxtaposes Aesop and "Ecclesiastes, or the Preachers"

- meditates on the nature of the youth, the manhood, and the age: "Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers"

- the old people mingle their memories together and do not distinguish the sad realities of the world any more, that is why when the iron gate shuts behind them (death), and when the world forgets them, they render the iron portal as the gates of pearl

- the patriarch's speech offers a farewell to life